24 DECEMBER 1965, Page 10

The Great Storyteller Somerset Maugham had lived out the lives

a dozen lesser men. The young medical stude in Victorian London, the successful Edwardi• playwright and British intelligence agent, the pr fessional, first-person-singular traveller in t Far East and the South Seas, and, finally, the di enchanted, world-famous novelist who look at humanity from the terrace of the Vil Mauresque—all these personas were to be fou in his work. Hardly any wonder that his boo are said to have sold over sixty million copies. Y his literary achievement was firmly based his great talents as a stylist and his great insig into human affairs. I don't think that there a finer study of the English literary life th, Cakes and Ale. It seems fitting that he died I the same year as Winston Churchill.